This recession is very different

Courtesy of the Calculated Risk blog. Click to enlarge:
Come back and look at this whenever you hear happy talk from Democrats about the unemployment rate dropping. The reason the news reports have been talking about a “drop” in unemployment is because the rate they’re talking about doesn’t give the whole picture. It doesn’t count people who’ve given up looking for work. The unemployment rate reported by the media (called “U3 Unemployment“) went down because people left the work force.
That’s not good, in case you were wondering.*ahem*